Day 3 at SAS included more in-depth interviews within the marketing field as well as exploration of other fields relating to marketing. I first met with designers that created the booths for the SAS Global Forum conference, which included several hubs where SAS could display their work and products to potential clients. Each hub has a booth that had to be coherent with each other and look unified. The designers ran me through their design process from start to finish; starting off in creating visuals in Adobe Illustrator, putting the panels together I’m Adobe InDesign, and making a 3D model of each booth in SolidWorks. Meeting with more than one designer that had the same job gave me a good idea of how individual style affects a given task. After that, we went to a meeting room where we met many creators and designers that showed us posters, mugs, T-shirts, stickers, and anything that contained a SAS logo or a clever catchphrase. We all discussed each piece of artwork and said what we thought of each one. For the past two days, I have gone to a different building to eat lunch, and today was no different. We ate lunch at the beautiful building R which had a completely different set of foods, including rice and refried beans, burgers, pizza, and an assortment of desserts. At SAS any employee can go to any of the massive and diverse dining halls and get completely different meals and environments.
After lunch, we explored other buildings outside marketing, starting with the Film production building. First, we went to the theater where we saw all the behind-the-scenes technology that went into a live panel in front of an audience. We then went to a soundproof movie studio, which was among the only 3 studios of its kind in North Carolina. Instead of working with a private company to shoot ads or make videos, SAS has a profesional-grade movie studio comparable to those at Hollywood. After, we went to the sound branch, where there were several employees that worked only on perfecting the sound on the countless voice-overs and videos that SAS shoot. Even though SAS has nothing to do with audio and video, they have a complete, professional-grade audio and video branch in their company. Finally, we went to the printing and cutting sector where SAS made all of their premium-grade books, manuals, panels, stickers, shirts, and anything that the designers created. Again, SAS does all the printing through the company itself instead of through an independent company. The printing warehouse included several complex printers and machines that could do anything from printing onto metal sheets to making sculptures and cutouts. The third day at SAS showed me where the designers’ work goes after creating a graphic and how it is developed to the customers’ needs.